Ideas of play beforehand
Before taking this class, I had not thought deeply about games from a more academic perspective. I value fun a lot in my life and was excited for how this class studied fun from an academic perspective. In the first few weeks of the course, I realized that so much goes into making games fun, and that this is something that can be useful, even if I am not a game designer formally in my job.
Focus on very structured games
One idea that I thought could be explored more in this class is the idea of play outside of formal game related settings. When I was in elementary school, I frequently played games that I made up with other kids on the playground. Many of my friends and I have very playful relationships and we have “bits” that we enact with one another whenever certain scenarios come up. These more informal acts of play or how I experience fun and play in my life on the day-to-day. I think it would be interesting to study this and how we implicitly form social rules that dictate what is play and what is not. I think this also could have interesting points in both platonic and romantic relationships, because sometimes couples will say things like oh I was just joking around or I was just messing around, but the other person gets hurt. This may have to do more with psychology than play, but I think that a lot of adults experience play in this fashion more often than formal games.
Ethics week and sexism in games
This leads to gender differences in play that I noticed as a result of the ethics portion of this class. Especially this year when I know less people on campus, I sometimes find myself wishing that I could be more included in stereotypically-male games like spike ball, frisbee, and soccer. I remember once this quarter I saw some of my guy friends running out, beers in their hands and sunglasses on their faces — they were so excited to go play spike ball with each other. I don’t remember the last time my girlfriends, and I were so excited to play a little game. That’s not to say that my friends and I don’t play however, but I think that play has maybe been defined according to patriarchal principles that don’t include things like listening, emotional support, and sitting on the couch for hours, talking about the same situation until somebody feels better. I think that a lot of activities that I do with friends aren’t classified as play, and thus haven’t been studied. I wish in retrospect that I had considered these activities to be a type of game when we studied the walking sim type of games. When my friend is telling me about a situation in depth for an hour, and I am deeply empathizing with her, I think I achieve the same effect as if I was playing an emotional decision making game on steam.
I was really grateful for Shana’s lecture week about gender in games. It made me remember how in preschool, I used to hide my dinosaurs when my girl friends came over to play with me and replace them with Barbies. Those were gender roles that I had learned at the age of four, even coming from what I would classify as a pretty progressive household. I thought that I would be judged for playing with the boy games and those all ended up being much more aligned with what I ended up being interested in at school. But even at 4, I felt like it was at odds with my gender identity to play with stereotypically-male toys.
Summary
I am really happy to have taken this class. I really would like to thank Christina and my TA, Krishnan, for making this such a good experience.
